S.C. Supreme Court to hear appeal in Bluffton shooting

COLUMBIA — For violent criminals, South Carolina is a tougher place than Georgia.

That’s true in at least one instance that the S.C. Supreme Court will consider this month.

Lucius Simuel, housed in the S.C. Department of Corrections’ Lieber facility, is appealing his life in prison sentence with no possibility of parole, for his conviction stemming from a shooting in a Bluffton apartment in 2008.

Simuel’s prior conviction in Georgia prompted the steep sentence. Even though his false imprisonment guilty plea and conviction occurred in Georgia, it is classified as a “most serious” offense of kidnapping in South Carolina and brings a life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In Georgia, the offense is punishable by a maximum 10-year prison term.

Simuel, who was once employed at an area furniture store, is appealing his sentence to the S.C. Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear his suit on May 23.

It was the afternoon on July 28, 2008, when Simuel and Demetrius Price arrived at the Bluffton home of brothers Deon and Deverol Cannick, ages 18 and 24 at the time, in Plantation Point Apartments, 897 Fording Island Rd. Deon was playing the video game Halo when the two Savannah men arrived. The Cannick brothers are described as drug dealers in briefs on file with the Supreme Court.

Price and Simuel forced their way into the home after the brothers declined their offers to sell them pills and cocaine.

Deon described the staircase shooting that would paralyze him from the neck down.

“I put my hands up in the air and said, ‘Please don’t shoot me. You can have anything you want,’” said Deon Cannick, according to court testimony. He said the gunmen told him to come closer, so Deon put his hands in the air and approached. He was restraining his 3-year-old pit bull Nina. When the dog was released, she stayed back.

“He waived the gun to the left side of my neck and he shot me,” said Deon.

He tumbled on the stairs and lay bleeding.

A few moments later, his brother Deverol Cannick, went outside to get a description of the vehicle, but the shooters were still outside. He saw the two men, apologized for coming outside and laid down on the ground. Simuel shot at him three times, hitting him once in the abdomen and once in the hand. “I just remember my brother running up and down the stairs frantically because he was in shock that he had just got shot,” testified Deon Cannick.

“I remember talking to my brother and telling him I might not make it, call the ambulance,” he said, according to his testimony transcript. “And so he came downstairs and picked me up, and we got into the back of the (Dodge) Caliber, and we drove to the head of the neighborhood, and that’s when the ambulance came in.”

The brothers were unarmed at the time of the shooting, but court records say the apartment housed four guns, brass knuckles, two bundles of hydrocodone tablets tucked into a Timberland box, and marijuana.